The Pine Boxes His Class Built

Then I told him about the sheet by the door, and the funeral home, and the thirty years of calls, and the one thing Dale could not stop worrying about.

I asked him flat out if he would be the one to answer the phone when a family could not pay.

He set down the board he was holding. He did not say anything for what felt like a full minute.

Then he said, “Mrs. Ruth, I built my first casket in that shop when I was sixteen. It was for a little girl. I cried the whole way through it and Mr. Dale never once made me feel bad about it. I have been waiting twenty years for somebody to ask me to do this again.”

He told me about that little girl. She was six, she had drowned in a farm pond, and she was so small the box did not take much lumber, which Cody said was the worst part of all of it.

He said Mr. Dale had stood next to him the whole time, and when Cody’s hands got to shaking too bad to work, Dale did not take the plane away from him.

He just put his own hand over Cody’s hand, the way Dale always did, and they ran the stroke together until the shaking stopped.

“I have built a lot of fine things since then,” Cody said. “Kitchens for people with more money than sense. But I have never once felt the way I felt in that shop, like my two hands were good for the exact thing they were made for.”

He wiped his face with the back of his wrist and he did not try to hide it.

Then he asked me how Dale was really doing, and I told him the plain truth, and he said he would come out to the house that very week to see him, and he did.

The two of them sat in the back bedroom for an hour. I do not know everything they said. But I know Cody came out steady, and I know Dale slept easy that night.

I drove home and I told Dale I had found his man.

He was too weak to say much. But he reached over and squeezed my hand, and he smiled, and he said, “Cody. Of course it’s Cody.” And then he slept better than he had in weeks.